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Slate™

A truly beautiful typeface that achieves stellar levels of readability, in print and on screen. Meet Slate, from award-winning designer Rod McDonald. This six-weight sans serif family is a rare example of sublime aesthetics meeting world-class functionality, and no graphic communicator will want to be without it.

The Slate typeface family melds superb functionality and aesthetic elegance into a remarkable communications tool. Few typefaces possess the beauty and power of this design.

Slate is the work of Rod McDonald, an award-winning typeface designer and lettering artist. At one point in his forty-year career, McDonald participated in a typeface legibility and readability research project conducted by the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB). There, McDonald learned which design traits were best suited to maximizing character legibility and text readability.

Shortly after his work with CNIB, McDonald was commissioned to design a large sans serif typeface family for Toronto Life magazine. Although not meant to be a “legibility face,” the design gave McDonald an opportunity to test several of the theories he formed during the CNIB project. Around the same time, McDonald also developed a sans serif family for Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. This typeface was primarily intended for use on the college’s Web site.

McDonald was pleased with both designs, he says, but craved further exploration. “I felt that I had only scratched the surface of what I wanted in a sans,” he says. “I liked the soft, quiet look of the magazine face but was also encouraged by my success in drawing a good legibility design for on-screen use.”

“One of the things I wanted was a type that could function as well in print as on-screen,” McDonald recalls. To help achieve his goal, McDonald worked with the Microsoft Typography Team to learn about ClearType technology. ClearType was developed by Microsoft to improve the readability of on-screen text, especially on liquid crystal displays (such as laptop screens), flat panel monitors and mobile device displays.

McDonald’s technological savvy and prior work on sans serifs for print and on-screen use have paid off magnificently in the Slate family of typefaces. Slate blends features of McDonald’s earlier sans serifs into a humanistic sans with extraordinary levels of legibility.“Although it’s far too early to know if what I wanted works across the board,” says McDonald, “initial testing in both print and on the web are quite positive.”

In purely aesthetic terms, Slate is a beautiful design. “I didn’t want a face with an ‘engineered’ look, or with any noticeable design gimmicks or devices, says McDonald. “I wanted a pure design. I confess that I was ruthless with any character that wanted to stand out from the rest.”

Slate is available in six weights of roman and complementary italics, with slight changes in style from the light to the black weights. The light is reminiscent of early American sans, like News Gothic; the medium has the feel of Akzidenz Grotesk, and the black functions much like the bold weights of Futura or Franklin. Overall, Slate is a typeface of grace, power and exceptional versatility.

Licenses for desktop fonts

A typical desktop font EULA will allow you to install the font on your computer for use with authoring tools including word processors, design tools and other applications that permit font selection. Fonts can also be used for creation of print documents, static images (JPEG, TIFF, PNG) and logos. The cost of a desktop font license is determined by the number of workstations on which the font is to be used.

Licenses for Fonts.com Web Fonts subscriptions

The Fonts.com Web Fonts license provides access to a selection of fonts for use on websites for use with CSS@font-face. Font delivery from our global network is available through all subscriptions – even our free plan. Some plans include the option to self-host, access to desktop fonts, and use of our FontExplorer X font manager and Typecast design application. The price of a plan is determined by its pageview allowance and other features included.

Licenses for mobile apps

A mobile app license permits the embedding of a font into the iOS, Android or Windows Phone mobile platforms for a single title and a set number of app installations. You can view and modify the installation limit from the cart. App installations can be spread out across the platforms your app is available for. A new license is not required to cover updates to an app, however installations of newer versions of your app do count toward your installation limit.

Licenses for electronic publications (eBooks)

An electronic publication license can be used for the embedding of fonts into electronic documents including e-books, e-magazines and e-newspapers. A license covers only a single title but is valid for the full operating life of that title. Every issue of an e-magazine, e-newspaper or other form of e-periodical is considered a separate, new publication. Format variations do not count as separate publications. If a publication is updated and distributed to existing users, a new license is not required. However, updated versions issued to new customers are defined as new publications and require a separate license.

Server licenses

Server licenses authorize the installation of a font on a server that is accessed by remote users or website visitors. These licenses are commonly used by Web-based businesses providing goods that are personalized by its users such as business cards, images with captions and personalized merchandise. Users are not allowed to download the font file and the font may not be used outside the server environment. The font may not be employed for a software as a service (SaaS) application in which the service is the actual product and not the means of providing the product.
Server licenses cover a set number of CPU cores on production servers (development servers are not counted) on which the font is installed. The license is valid for 1 year.